


to loosen, to find

by whatsarasays



Category: Death Stranding (Video Games)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Family, Friendship, Gen, Headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:55:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21904096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatsarasays/pseuds/whatsarasays
Summary: A thin layer of sweat, sallow complexion, and shaky hands become his closest companions. It’s hell, and it’s worth it when he finds two sets of footprints sixty times per day.Heartman is neither dead nor alive.Stranded somewhere in between.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 46





	to loosen, to find

The internet crashes, the sky precipitates time, and the first voidouts reverberate in shockwaves throughout the earth.

Heartman watches the rain wreak havoc on cars and street lamps with his small face pressed against the window. Iron oxide creeps over everything like a red plague, devouring all that it touches. His mother calls him back with a hushed whisper.

The world goes underground.

After the Stranding, there are no boats, no planes, no way back across the Atlantic. His heart is responsible for their exile: a unique malformation—one which could only be treated by the practiced hands of American specialists. The destabilized government stamps 'refugee' in their passports and assigns them a single-room apartment within an overpacked subterranean shelter. Without foreign imports, there is little left to remind them of the old country. As they ration through nostalgic dry-goods—black Yorkshire tea and crisp sugary biscuits—Heartman grows up longing for a place he hardly knew.

He is not American but nor is he British.

Stranded somewhere in between.

* * *

Many years later, when Charlotte Penner smiles at him from across the lecture hall, something tightens and aligns.

Universities, as they once were, are things of the past, but education is alive and frantic after the Stranding. Life and death collided, and they are all desperate to have their questions answered.

Heartman is searching for something else.

He fumbles an inelegant offer to get lunch after the presentation and discovers Charlotte is no scientist, but the editor of an academic journal. Wrapped in an ochre sweater that does nothing for her eyes, she asks him about his studies, counters with well-thought questions, and retorts with witty remarks. Equal parts smitten and intimidated, he tries to squelch his turmoil and act casual.

While he manages his usual articulation, his body betrays him. His knees bump against the underside of the restaurant's too-small table. A lettuce leaf falls from his mouth after a miscalculated bite. While excitedly explaining the nuances of carbon dating, he over-gesticulates and knocks his water off the table. The plastic cup splashes in the resulting puddles and goes plinking across the floor.

The café stares.

Laughing, Charlotte pulls his hands away from his hot embarrassed face and plants a kiss on the tip of his nose.

He has no choice but to marry her.

* * *

Amelia arrives under Scorpius and does not inherit his troublesome heart. With a bundle of pink baby in an even pinker blanket squirming in his arms, he swears to make the world a better place for her. Her tiny hand then grips his crooked forefinger as if to seal the promise and tears prick the corners of his eyes. 

They sway in the delivery room.

Love is a knot.

* * *

Everything surges and spins and snaps when a torrent of voltage rips him from the shores of death.

He gasps awake beneath a film of gypsum dust. With sand still stinging beneath his fingernails, he cannot place himself. It reeks of smoke and carrion. The lights are dim and fluttering. A rainbow of codes crackles through the building’s loudspeakers—yellow, orange, white, blue. Bloodied nurses and doctors scurry and shout.

Despite the chaos, Heartman fixates on the beeping LCD at his bedside.

Every traitorous peak pulls him further and further from the Beach.

* * *

He joins Bridges in exchange for a laboratory in the shadow of his former life. Brain damage can only be skirted through a three-and-twenty-one cycle, which means he must put his downtime somewhere. As selfish as the plan is, he cannot bear to be flagrantly wasteful with the few moments he still spends in the land of the living.

He remains a humanitarian, however misshapen his heart.

During the first months of his experiment, his desk becomes a pharmacy of toppled orange pill bottles—beta-blockers, blood thinners, hormone stabilizers, and more. A thin layer of perspiration, sallow complexion, and shaky hands become his closest companions. Burns pepper his chest from the defibrillation pads and his nerves fry. It’s hell, and it’s worth it when he finds two sets of footprints sixty times per day.

He is neither dead nor alive.

Stranded somewhere in between.

* * *

On the cusp of a decade, a legendary porter tracks mud and snow into his quilted neon prison. The vinyl funeral dirge is not the only thing he interrupts. The deliverer’s presence pulls at loose threads, and Heartman’s grief unravels between explanations of extinctions and umbilical cords. His story mirrors Sam’s: wife and child lost in a godforsaken hole. Yet the porter still trudges across the continent following a strand to his sister, dutifully placing Q-pids in terminals along the way.

Sam is hope.

Begrudging curmudgeonly hope,

but hope nonetheless.

* * *

When they christen Sam to pursue Amelie—heavens, to save the world!—they make a solemn promise at Fragile’s sickbed to care for Lou in his absence. Heartman recognizes it as a father’s final wish. As Deadman hovers with the capsule, Lockne places a reverent hand on the glass, and Heartman tentatively follows suit. The child encased in amber reminds him of other things—a writer in yellow knitwear, a baby in blush flannel.

If Sam ends the Stranding, there is a chance Heartman’s connection to the Beach could be forever severed. No running along muted shores in search of footprints; no calling out into clouded ashen skies; no pulling at the frayed tethers of former bonds.

Louise floats in silence, unaware of the conflicted man leaving fingerprints on her pod.

He retracts his hand and nods a farewell to Sam.

It’s worth the unwinding, the breakage, the loss.

* * *

“Got you cake. And tea. Didn’t know if you liked milk or sugar so…” The twins jingle the saucer in front of him to show-off the creamer and sugar packets they tucked neatly against the side of the cup. The china features a Presidential seal across the front. Stately dishware for a stately event.

“Thank you, Målingen,” Heartman smiles, deducing Mama’s presence by her casual speech. He is late to the after-party, having been unconscious on the sofa during President Die-hardman’s inauguration, waking only in time to see Sam slip away.

After the porter's retrieval, Heartman's connection to the Beach has been sporadic at best. Soon to flicker out. No longer does he oscillate on the twenty-one-minute rotation. Considering his wavering ties to the Beach, there's no reason. But in abandoning that decade-long cadence, he discovered his heart lost its natural endurance. That was expected. His heart was trouble long before he began forcibly suspending its rhythm, and he never counted on its recovery. Didn't think he would need to. The florescent AED strapped across him is as permanent as he intended it to be.

The cake is left behind on a credenza as he takes a welcomed sip of the piping tea and savors its robust taste. When Mama asks him about his forthcoming surgery, the porcelain rim stills at his mouth.

_Surgery?_

She quirks an eyebrow, “Your transplant?”

“No, I don’t-,” he stops and tries again, “I cannot imagine that anyone who has abused their own organ to such an excessive degree deserves the gift of another. There are far more worthy candidates.”

“Well, it’s already in the works. You have Die-Hardman and Deadman to thank for that,” she shrugs, “Don’t fight it.”

Heartman returns the teacup to its dish with a clatter, feeling as though he might drop it.

Mama breaks into a gap-toothed smile, tips onto her toes, and wraps her arms over his shoulders. The AED jabs awkwardly between them. Heartman’s free hand hovers above the twins, overwhelmed and uncertain.

Then—gently, gently—his eyes twist shut and he pulls them close.


End file.
